I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.

The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.

A prevalent fallacy is the assumption that a proof of an afterlife would also be a proof of the existence of a deity. This is far from being the case. If, as I hold, there is no good reason to believe that a god either created or presides over this world, there is equally no good reason to believe that a god created or presides over the next world, on the unlikely supposition that such a thing exists.

It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

It is possible to be a meta-physician without believing in a transcendent reality; for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience.

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.